Shale Drillers Torch Natural Gas
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on September 28th, 2011 4:48 am by HL
Shale Drillers Torch Natural Gas
Across western North Dakota, hundreds of fires rise above fields of wheat and sunflowers, illuminating the prairie like giant fireflies. They are not wildfires caused by lightning strikes or other acts of nature, but the deliberate burning of natural gas by oil companies rushing to extract oil from the Bakken shale field. The gas bubbles up alongside the far more valuable oil and drillers treat the gas as waste and burn it. Every day, more than 100 million cubic feet of natural gas is flared this way — enough energy to heat half a million homes for a day, reports the New York Times.
